1. Field of the Invention
In today's business environment the telephone is often the primary means of communication in many different situations: for example placing catalogue orders, checking airline schedules, querying prices, reviewing account balances, and recording and retrieving messages. Conventionally, each telephone call involves a service representative talking to a caller, asking questions, entering responses into a computer and reading information to a caller from a computer screen.
It is known to automate this process by substituting audio data processing apparatus for the operator. Such apparatus answers the incoming call, receives information from, and provides information to, the caller. This has the advantages of reducing costs, providing better customer service, increasing the services available and extending the hours of operation.
However, in many current audio data processing systems the human-machine interaction is lengthy and cumbersome due to the fact that the voice messages delivered by the apparatus generally have to be delivered in sequence and contain multiple choice menus that have to be announced before each required user selection.
One way of shortening the human-machine interaction is to allow non-coded audio information to be entered which is subsequently transcribed. Some current commercial systems use conventional answering machines or similar devices to collect input in this way. Such schemes have the disadvantages that only sequential access is offered to the recorded signals, so, for example, there is no practical way to prioritize the handling of incoming messages according to urgency. Furthermore, the cost of audio transcription is very high, both in terms of manpower if carried out manually or in terms of computer resources if carried out using automatic speech recognition.